Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust is one of only four children’s hospital trusts in the UK, specializing in treating children up to the age of 18 and employing around 3,000 staff. They have been using Convene since the spring of 2014.
Anne Greaves, Digital Communications Officer at Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust told us how Convene has reduced their printing by nearly 60,000 pages a year.
She says that, “The main driver for switching to Convene was the amount of time and money we were spending on printing. The average board pack was 104 pages, with 14 participants and 11 meetings a year. That’s 16,000 pages. Then for the Trust Executive Group, which has 12 meetings a year, we were printing another 42,500 pages.”
“It was just crazy. You could be at the printer for an entire day. And the printer would break and jam because it was overheating. It’s actually funny to think back to the days we couldn’t use the printer for anything else for a couple of days because we were printing committee and board papers!” she further adds.
Offering Advanced Security Features
“Before choosing Convene to help us go paperless, we did a lot of research into the different products. We considered Dropbox and Google Drive, but being in the NHS we’ve got such a high level of security that those options were not appropriate for us,” Anne clarifies when asked about the use of file-sharing software.
“We then did a compare and contrast with a few specialist products, including Convene, and met with the different companies too. There were several factors that swayed us in favor of Convene. One was the cost. And another was the fact that Convene is cross-platform and works on Android, Windows and iOS too, whereas some of the others were just iPad. Plus, we got the sense there was a lot more flexibility in terms of moving Convene forward and adapting it to our needs, which wouldn’t necessarily be the case with the other providers,” she notes when discussing their decision-making process.
She narrates this to be the case as they recently asked the Convene team if they could have two different administrator levels. “We wanted a ‘super-user’ level to have control over creating accounts and configuring settings, with the secretaries who create the meetings and add the papers being administrators. That was implemented for us and gave us exactly what we wanted,” she said regarding the result of her organization’s request.
Enough Time to Test the Product
“The Convene team were really good about letting us try the product before buying the licenses, because it was a big culture change and we had to get the executives on board. There was a bit of skepticism at first, so for the first couple of board meetings we printed paper packs as well. Then, next time, we’d have just a couple of paper packs there. Then, we took the paper away altogether, and that worked fine,” she recounts when transitioning from hard copies to a paperless meeting software.
Work Offline and While Travelling
“The administrative time it has saved us was incredible. It used to take around five hours to prepare packs for a board meeting. Now it takes about 30 minutes,” she exclaimed.
“The user experience is very important and the drag and drop is great – it just pulls it all in for you and converts it to PDFs on the fly as well. That’s really handy. Executives find the portability very useful too, particularly if they are having to travel around. And they like that with Convene you can download and then work offline, so you’re not dependent on internet access. Basically it’s helped us be more efficient because we can do everything more quickly and with less fuss,” she further adds.
A Solution for the Whole Organization
Anne also notes that, “It was always our plan to start with the board and roll it out a bit further which is what we are now doing. We’re using Convene for all the board meetings and sub-committee meetings too, and it’s also used for our Trust Executive Group, which is for anyone at executive or associate director level, so a bit like a senior management team.”
For Anne, people in her organization are starting to know more about it and like it. They’re finding people saying to them, “Can I use it for my meetings too?” Anne has stated that people are taking notice of it and want it for themselves, noting that there’s a lot of potential with the use of Convene.